J.C. van Weenen (1990)
used Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings, as a metaphor to
examine the materials life cycle. His focus was on waste prevention, a subject
that has recently been recast into the more comprehensive notion of “material
efficiency,” which aims to minimize negative sustainability impacts of
materials over the life cycle. We are long overdue for literature on material efficiency
to complement the widely popular and related body of work on energy efficiency.
Members of the academic community have recently elaborated a vision of material
efficiency, including engineering discussions on reducing material demand
(Allwood et al. 2011) and economic analysis on market incentives (Söderholm and
Tilton 2012). The two books reviewed aim to bring the idea of material
efficiency from a research dialogue to a broader audience including, possibly,
to the general population.

Both books begin by confirming
society’s need for materials, such as plastics, concrete and metals, and by establishing
continued need and growth of materials use into the future. Both look in detail
at types of mineral ores and at primary materials production. Both follow
industrial materials through their loops and life-cycles. Both are technical
reports with an abundance of flow diagrams, tables and graphs. Both ultimately
call for behavioral change and social solutions.

I read the Rankin book
first and was pleased to see the coverage of big sustainability concepts, such as
cleaner production, The Natural Step framework, and the IPAT equation that
relates pollution intensity to population, affluence and technology. The author
provides a survey of environmental challenges confronting the minerals industry.
Other chapters examine mineral economics, mine development, mineral extraction
and processing, and primary material production. Curiously, I was comforted by
this volume, but then realized that it was a feeling of nostalgia: Rankin
revisits my engineering education (geology, mine shaft engineering, mineral
beneficiation, tailings dam design, and ternary phase diagrams), and then reviews
much of the environmental thinking that underpins industrial ecology and
materials flow analysis, that I became familiar with in the 1990’s. The book also
updates this knowledge … to about 2005.

Rankin relies heavily
on mining industry proceedings, with selected illustrations from the sustainability
literature, and a curious Australian bias (including detailed metallurgical
process flow diagrams from places like Cadjebut, Western Australia). It is
fact-laden, written clearly and concisely with clean line-diagrams. It is also
predictable and reminiscent of previous work in mineral economics (e.g., Tilton
2003) and extractive metallurgy (e.g., Gilchrist 1989). Published out of CSIRO, Australia’s public
research agency, where Rankin was chief scientist of the minerals division, the
tone and messages are consistent with industry viewpoints and established
government perspectives on balancing “economic, environmental and social
sustainability of the industry... [with] technologies for tomorrow’s
challenges” (CSIRO 2012). He does eventually note that the minerals sector has
been “adopting the language of sustainability … [but is as] … yet to take the
next major steps” (p. 380). But the book also fails to take us to those steps.
The chapter on water, perhaps the weakest given its brevity and simplicity, defines
terms and presents issues, yet (surprisingly given that the author is in such a
dry country) suggests no solutions on water innovation. The book’s penultimate chapter
“Towards zero waste” is an engineer’s list of technical options reminiscent of pollution
prevention handbooks from the 1990’s, including the requisite diagram on the Kalundborg
industrial metabolism.

Minerals, Metals and
Sustainability
is valuable to students of mining, minerals and metals as a friendly
introduction to sustainability, providing a broad interdisciplinary survey of
environmental and industrial ecology concepts. But this book neither guides nor
innovates. Rankin concludes by reviving a ten-year old framework (Young et al.
2001) that has found on-going traction within the metals industry (the
International Council on Mining and Metals, in particular) as a framework for
material efficiency. The new analysis suggested, however, provides little inspiration
other than to request improved industrial efficiencies, better use of
materials, and a plea for “design for the environment.” Fortunately, these very
themes are not only explored but elaborated in charming detail by the other
book reviewed here.

The WellMet2050 team
from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, has consolidated
several years of work into an easy-reading book that is both valuable and entertaining.
It is also beautifully organized with luscious graphics including, most
notably, numerous brilliant Sankey diagrams. The associated website provides
extra materials, such as readers’ questions and with answers and downloads of
the book free-of-charge. Music, art and beer drinking also find roles in the book’s
narrative.

In the introductory
section the authors outline the types, use, energy, emissions and economics of
industrial materials, and substantiate their focus on steel and aluminum as
cornerstones of our buildings, vehicles, machinery and other goods. The second
section “with one eye open” takes us methodically to their “devastating” (p.
162) finding that heavy industry is already tremendously efficient and that future
intensity improvements in energy and emissions are limited. Part three opens
“both eyes” to get to the heart of material efficiency and demand reduction. Their
vision is progressively developed with colorful examples that move the reader
through various strategies. The strategy of intensity of material use is
illustrated showing how rail tracks could be used four times over through
smarter design. Their nuanced argument about
product replacement vs. durability for longer life products is neatly supported
by an example showing that most refrigerators are condemned for lack of pennies
worth of lubricant. Finally, in the last chapters, the Allwood et al. provide
context and return to assess their findings against targets for emissions
reductions. They provide implementable actions available to business, policy
and individuals, such as preserving and updating material composition
information over the product life cycle.

On the way through this
book, the authors happily opine on the fruitlessness of plastic bag policies,
the inherent weaknesses of life cycle assessment, the origins of Sankey
diagrams, and the waste of engineering overdesign. One gem is their deconstruction
of the industrial myth that it takes only 5% the energy to recycle aluminum vs.
producing new metal from ore.

I did manage to cultivate
some fuss with this book. One is the intentionally narrow focus of analysis on
carbon dioxide. This not only ignores the longer list of usual greenhouse gas
villains (more than one-third of direct emissions from primary aluminum
production are perfluorocarbon compounds (IAI 2012)), but also the broader
suite of sustainability issues. A second qualm is more stylistic: the book is relentlessly
optimistic yet the pessimist in me kept seeing clear and convincing
demonstrations that hard social changes are needed. The authors carefully
understate the message that “behaviour options appear to be more powerful than
those related to technology” (p. 281). They quietly and weakly suggest to
industry that “we must not build any new production facilities” for primary aluminum
and steel (p. 283) because primary capacity is already sufficient if their
suggestions for material efficiency are implemented.

Why I will use this
book by Allwood and colleagues is certainly for their elegant visual communication
of materials flows and metrics of energy and carbon that supports their vision. Continual improvement of industry will not be
sufficient to achieve any measure of sustainability, and therefore society
(supported by public policy) will need to adjust its patterns of behavior and
expectations of prosperity. I am more comfortable in presenting these messages somewhat
veiled within an engineering discussion. The Cambridge team poses and addresses
their question of significant emissions reductions by 2050, and ultimately presents
options for material efficiency and to engage and affect practical change in
industry, government and private life. I should note that Allwood and team are
already stepped forward in their work: in
January they organized a Royal Society Meeting in London on energy, economics,
culture and other dimensions of materials efficiency (Phil. Trans. R. Soc.
2013).

These books ­­both make
contributions to the quandary that underlies much of industrial ecology: the
physical provision of function, the interrelation of products made up of
materials made from natural resources, and the multidimensional characterization
of materials flows and footprints at different scales, segregated by both time
and responsibility. Rankin’s book is Janus looking backwards: it is a
conventionalist compilation of thinking from the past twenty years that
provides fundamentals and a dated diagnosis suitable to a narrow audience.
Allwood et al., on the other hand, is Janus with both eyes open with insight
and cheer – looking forward.

CONTENTS

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About Me

Steven B. Young is Associate Professor, School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED), Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo.
He researches sustainable materials management (SMM), life-cycle assessment (LCA) and enterprise carbon management. His interests relate to corporate social responsibility (CSR), standards and assurance, industrial supply-chains, and approaches to assess sustainability of products and material systems.